A sweet, sad song about the Hillsboro heretic,
B. Cates: boy-Socrates, latter-day Dreyfus,
Romeo with a biology book
.

This passage, said by Hornbeck gives is showing Rachel what he has written in his newspaper in Baltimore. In his article he uses three metaphors to describe Bert Cates. He is doing in term of his lives and what he is like at each stage of Cates life. He starts off telling off what he was like as a boy, then what he was like later in his life, and finally what he is like now because of it.